These closed environments are much more tentacular in their ability to collect our data. I explain to you.
Each step, each open page, each content consulted or produced purchased, each clicked video is all information on you, your life and your interests that can be collected and processed by advertising technologies. The good news is that when it happens on the web, there are at least a few limits. The bad thing is that the situation is much more complicated among large platforms, there precisely where you engage the most.
Unlike the web where you often ask you to accept or refuse advertising tracking, on Insta or Tiktok we don’t bother you: you have already forgotten what question they asked you a long time ago before you click on the button allowing you to access their service.
These closed environments that are each social network and each large platform with 1,000 facets and features such as Google, Apple or Facebook/Instagram, to name only three, are much more tentacular in their ability to collect data used to segment yourself with advertising aims when you have logged. To escape it, you would have to be disconnected from these services all the time. It is no coincidence that advertisers love them: the data segments of these actors and their ability to allow brands to reach “good targets” are unrivaled.
Because Google is Android, the browser, the search engine, shopping, maps, gmail, youtube … that is to say your location (if you allow it), your personal data when you allow Chrome to capture your registration data on any site, your centers of interest via your navigation history, the keywords of what you are looking Mashs, your tastes (when you sail connected to your Google account or you have logged on YouTube), the recipients of your messages on Gmail (some even say the content of your messages), your address book … all your life roughly. Same thing for Apple (iOS, browser, applications).
And that’s not all. Facebook knows everything you do not only within its network but everywhere on the web. “All the sites that advertise Facebook, including media sites, have a Facebook pixel. For any user who opens an equipped web page, the pixel sends Facebook the information he has consulted this page. It is enough for that that the Internet user has connected only once on Facebook on the Device he uses and that he was not delogued during the last session of use” important French agency. And of course this is done provided that the Internet user consents to the deposit of cookies on the site he visits. It is therefore no longer even a question of displaying “like” buttons (in the past, that was the marker to find out if Facebook was capturing data on the web)! Often the pixel is there, while the Like button is not there.
“The sites share your email address to their adtech partners and service providers on the open web and at other platforms like Pinterest and Tiktok. They do it when they get your authorization to collect your data. Likewise, if you log on to any site or application using Facebook, the platform captures your email: even if it is chopped, it is very easy for algorithms Reconciliations, “recalls Pascal Vautrin, founder of Dignilog.
You can see, in terms of platforms, the list of what is possible to know about your connected life is so long, that it would even be more judicious to reverse the reasoning: “Instead of trying to understand what Google or Meta know of you, try to know what they don’t know. You will have trouble finding the militant.
It goes without saying that if you look or click on a pub on Insta, Tiktok or Whatever, advertisers can know. It is essential for them so that they understand if their campaigns have worked. On the other hand, they will not know what you, taken individually, likes, consults or posts in general on the network.
Also, as on the web, advertisers can “inject” in the circuit of a tiktok or an Instagram their own data on their customers including hypothetically you. They usually do so either to exclude their customers from the campaign, in order to avoid wasting money and also tiring them. They do it and above all to target people who look like their best customers for example. This is called in a machine learning to make “alike look”, a master card of a Facebook, which has a monstrous volume of data on more than 3 billion monthly active users in the world, which advertisers love.
Finally, even in this area things are starting to move: under pressure from the European Commission, and to try to appease it, Meta announced in November its intention to soon offer in Europe on Facebook and Instagram an option of “less personalized advertisements” to its members. Those who choose this option will have their experience more strongly interrupted by advertising, which they will not be able to escape for a few seconds for example, a bit like on YouTube. On the other hand Meta undertakes to no longer collect their data via its pixels on the web but only on the basis of the content they consult and with which they interact within the social network. This option continues to include taking into account the age, gender and location of the Internet user.
